5 ms·

So, in order to get around this DNS-based filtering, all a teenager has to do is change the DNS servers on their computer or device to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4? This

So, in order to get around this DNS-based filtering, all a teenager has to do is change the DNS servers on their computer or device to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4? This seems like a move designed to placate rather than provide any real protection - like all such schemes. There's no alternative to supervising young people's internet use. Teenagers will look up porn - it's best to be adult and intelligent about it, and protect them from its worst effects, rather than trying to filter the content itself.

indeyets 13y ago
alternate DNS can be blocked, I guess. But something like this will work: http://dnscrypt.org/ http://dnscrypt.org/
guard-of-terra 13y ago
Teenagers are not kids. Any law or measure that lumps teenagers and kids together is a sabotage. Limiting kids' discovery of porn is a worthy feat, but trying to limit teenagers is poinless and stupid.
- 46Bit 13y ago
  At what age does someone gain the right to discover Porn?
  - guard-of-terra 13y ago
    I would give away my "right" of spontaneously discovering porn. "Suddently porn" is an annoying issue on many sites in the web that are on the side of shabby. Take torrent trackers for example.
    - makomk 13y ago
      Ironically, one cause of sudden unexpected porn in the UK is apparently content filters on mobile internet access. Like all content filters, they have both false positives and questionable classification decisions, except that some of the mobile providers apparently decided it was a good idea to use the blocked-content page to advertise the hardcore porn you can buy from them.
    - 46Bit 13y ago
      Thanks for the reply - I think more what I was looking for was your viewpoint on why kids accidentally seeing porn is a bad thing? My assumption is that it wouldn't be of interest to them and they'd move on, but that's pure speculation.
      - guard-of-terra 13y ago
        I think that human sex life is a pretty fragile thing and letting people to tamper with yours for their fun or their profit is not cool. By sex live I mean the whole mental picture. If you start drawing it from accidental porn, you'll get it distorted. You will get it distorted anyway when you'll seek porn, but now it would be your own decision at least.
    - workbench 13y ago
      Funny you should mention torrents By making it require a work around to view even mild pornography, the work arounds will inevitably lead to areas of the most hardcore right in your face. Say some 12 year old wants to look at naked ladies, what's he gonna be doing? Probably google image search boobs or some soft core pinup girls name, relatively harmless and have his curiosity satisfied. However if the lower levels of that are blocked the work around with inevitably lead to a much bigger source with the violent pornography just a click away from the more regular. Same thing happened with P2P, we used to have services where it was easy to download a single mid quality song, companies put an end to those so we found a much more efficient way to shift much larger amounts of data. Now it's hard to steal a single song but really easy to steal a full 320 album rip.
  - Shorel 13y ago
    I believe 13 years old would be just right.
kintamanimatt 13y ago
> its worst effects Of which there are none. Nudity and sex are normal, not damaging.
- andyhmltn 13y ago
  May I ask why this was downvoted? He's absolutely correct. I suppose that's what you get for living in a society that demonizes sex.
  - pyre 13y ago
    Well, if an impressionable youngster's only experiences about sex are from porn, it increases expectations. Take anal sex for example. I've heard that it's increasingly expected of teen girls (by teen boys) due to its prevalence in porn. Not only that, but if you only learned about anal sex from porn, you wouldn't realize that you that 'ass-to-mouth' is probably a bad idea, wearing a condom is probably not optional, lubricant is probably not optional, etc. This isn't to say that porn is inherently a bad thing[1]. The issue is that if the teens aren't getting good information elsewhere (other than the base 'here are some anatomical diagrams of sex organs' teaching), porn becomes a learning tool, which isn't necessarily a good thing. [1] I realize that the production sucks in a lot of people that suffered from abuse, and it's debatable whether or not large 'porn houses' are just exploiting these people.
    - kintamanimatt 13y ago
      If your concern is children's expectations being set to unrealistic levels, Disney should be the first to be go. Magazines and advertising should be banned from using Photoshop, too. Being exposed to a variety of options and ways to have sex isn't bad. Anal sex can be quite fun, and if someone doesn't like it they're quickly going to say no. Rimming has its risks (like everything else) and isn't for everyone (like everything else), but it's pretty common and not horrendously unsafe. If you try to have sex without lube, you're quickly going to discover the problem. I can't speak for straight porn, but most porn that involves penetrative sex features condoms; if you're watching porn that was made in the last 10-20 years, it's really difficult not to see condoms in action. Just about everybody reading this grew up with porn as teens (and possibly before) and we're not broken or messed up. Before the internet, teens got their hands on magazines and those generations aren't damaged by it either. If anything, I'd suspect teens today are better educated (and having better sex) than any generation before. Porn, together with improved sex education, has had a large role to play. Saying that porn is bad because it teaches people different ways to have sex doesn't make sense. However, I will concede that the key here is sex education. If someone isn't receiving sex education they're not going to know about safe sex anyway, and restricting access to porn isn't going to make the situation any better. Porn should be supplemented by a decent sex education, and thankfully an adequate sex education is provided in the vast majority of the developed world. If anything I'm grateful for all the porn I watched as a teen, and I think my sex life today is significantly better because of it. It taught me more than my prudish religious parents would (or could) and combined with my school's sex education classes, I was good to go have fun, figure out what was right for me, and do it without getting diseases along the way!
retube 13y ago
Yes it is impossible to completely block the distribution of such content, and yes maybe this is a particularly weak solution. But that doesn't mean that this or simialr efforts should not be made: they will reduce the ease of availability which will cut down exposure to this type of material. I actually believe that all pornography should be behind a paywall, and any which is not is blocked (somehow). And no I am not abdicating responsibily of my children to the state - they still need to be taught responsible online behaviour - as I agree above such material will always be available for those who make the effort to circumvent restrictions. We don't not lock our houses because someone can still break in - but it dramatically cuts down on such attempts (and we still educate our children on why breaking into other peoples homes is a bad thing to do).
- jiggy2011 13y ago
  Why should it all be behind a paywall? And how would one define pornography? If I decide to post some naked pictures of myself online should I have to start processing credit cards and treating it as a business?
- yarrel 13y ago
  These efforts should not be made because quite apart from being immoral in themselves they are ineffective and have negative side effects.
- andyhmltn 13y ago
  >I actually believe that all pornography should be behind a paywall That's absurd! Really? Cutting off huge portions of the internet for 'safety' is both wrong and impossible. That's the beauty of the web: Nobody decides 'what gets put up' and what doesn't. Guess what would happen if a country implemented such a thing? People would just use international sites as many do already.
  - retube 13y ago
    You do not justify why it's wrong? And as I said in my OP, yes it is impossible, but some measures will cut exposure.
tehmaco 13y ago
I doubt that'll work - the PirateBay is currently blocked in the UK. If you change your DNS settings to use a non-UK server, it still returns the filtered IP address as they're silently intercepting lookups for banned domains and returning a non-authoritative answer. All they'd need to do is add in the 'adult' domains and that'd block the simplest workaround. You could still set up a non-UK VPN and bypass it entirely though ;)
- workbench 13y ago
  The Pirate Bay blocks actually use CleanFeed IIRC, which is the system originally put in place under the premise to block known child pornography domains. I consider this an abuse of the CleanFeed system.
- dspillett 13y ago
  > I doubt that'll work - the PirateBay is currently blocked in the UK. If you change your DNS settings to use a non-UK server, it still returns the filtered IP address as they're silently intercepting lookups for banned domains and returning a non-authoritative answer. Not on my ISP (A&A), though that may be the case for the big six. As you say, the VPN option is an easy way around. <hat material="tinfoil">Until the government mandate that ISPs should block anything like that unless you have a license for encrypted traffic, of course.</hat>

indeyets 13y ago

alternate DNS can be blocked, I guess. But something like this will work: http://dnscrypt.org/ http://dnscrypt.org/

guard-of-terra 13y ago

Teenagers are not kids. Any law or measure that lumps teenagers and kids together is a sabotage. Limiting kids' discovery of porn is a worthy feat, but trying to limit teenagers is poinless and stupid.

46Bit 13y ago
At what age does someone gain the right to discover Porn?
- guard-of-terra 13y ago
  I would give away my "right" of spontaneously discovering porn. "Suddently porn" is an annoying issue on many sites in the web that are on the side of shabby. Take torrent trackers for example.
  - makomk 13y ago
    Ironically, one cause of sudden unexpected porn in the UK is apparently content filters on mobile internet access. Like all content filters, they have both false positives and questionable classification decisions, except that some of the mobile providers apparently decided it was a good idea to use the blocked-content page to advertise the hardcore porn you can buy from them.
  - 46Bit 13y ago
    Thanks for the reply - I think more what I was looking for was your viewpoint on why kids accidentally seeing porn is a bad thing? My assumption is that it wouldn't be of interest to them and they'd move on, but that's pure speculation.
    - guard-of-terra 13y ago
      I think that human sex life is a pretty fragile thing and letting people to tamper with yours for their fun or their profit is not cool. By sex live I mean the whole mental picture. If you start drawing it from accidental porn, you'll get it distorted. You will get it distorted anyway when you'll seek porn, but now it would be your own decision at least.
  - workbench 13y ago
    Funny you should mention torrents By making it require a work around to view even mild pornography, the work arounds will inevitably lead to areas of the most hardcore right in your face. Say some 12 year old wants to look at naked ladies, what's he gonna be doing? Probably google image search boobs or some soft core pinup girls name, relatively harmless and have his curiosity satisfied. However if the lower levels of that are blocked the work around with inevitably lead to a much bigger source with the violent pornography just a click away from the more regular. Same thing happened with P2P, we used to have services where it was easy to download a single mid quality song, companies put an end to those so we found a much more efficient way to shift much larger amounts of data. Now it's hard to steal a single song but really easy to steal a full 320 album rip.
- Shorel 13y ago
  I believe 13 years old would be just right.

kintamanimatt 13y ago

> its worst effects Of which there are none. Nudity and sex are normal, not damaging.

andyhmltn 13y ago
May I ask why this was downvoted? He's absolutely correct. I suppose that's what you get for living in a society that demonizes sex.
- pyre 13y ago
  Well, if an impressionable youngster's only experiences about sex are from porn, it increases expectations. Take anal sex for example. I've heard that it's increasingly expected of teen girls (by teen boys) due to its prevalence in porn. Not only that, but if you only learned about anal sex from porn, you wouldn't realize that you that 'ass-to-mouth' is probably a bad idea, wearing a condom is probably not optional, lubricant is probably not optional, etc. This isn't to say that porn is inherently a bad thing[1]. The issue is that if the teens aren't getting good information elsewhere (other than the base 'here are some anatomical diagrams of sex organs' teaching), porn becomes a learning tool, which isn't necessarily a good thing. [1] I realize that the production sucks in a lot of people that suffered from abuse, and it's debatable whether or not large 'porn houses' are just exploiting these people.
  - kintamanimatt 13y ago
    If your concern is children's expectations being set to unrealistic levels, Disney should be the first to be go. Magazines and advertising should be banned from using Photoshop, too. Being exposed to a variety of options and ways to have sex isn't bad. Anal sex can be quite fun, and if someone doesn't like it they're quickly going to say no. Rimming has its risks (like everything else) and isn't for everyone (like everything else), but it's pretty common and not horrendously unsafe. If you try to have sex without lube, you're quickly going to discover the problem. I can't speak for straight porn, but most porn that involves penetrative sex features condoms; if you're watching porn that was made in the last 10-20 years, it's really difficult not to see condoms in action. Just about everybody reading this grew up with porn as teens (and possibly before) and we're not broken or messed up. Before the internet, teens got their hands on magazines and those generations aren't damaged by it either. If anything, I'd suspect teens today are better educated (and having better sex) than any generation before. Porn, together with improved sex education, has had a large role to play. Saying that porn is bad because it teaches people different ways to have sex doesn't make sense. However, I will concede that the key here is sex education. If someone isn't receiving sex education they're not going to know about safe sex anyway, and restricting access to porn isn't going to make the situation any better. Porn should be supplemented by a decent sex education, and thankfully an adequate sex education is provided in the vast majority of the developed world. If anything I'm grateful for all the porn I watched as a teen, and I think my sex life today is significantly better because of it. It taught me more than my prudish religious parents would (or could) and combined with my school's sex education classes, I was good to go have fun, figure out what was right for me, and do it without getting diseases along the way!

retube 13y ago

Yes it is impossible to completely block the distribution of such content, and yes maybe this is a particularly weak solution. But that doesn't mean that this or simialr efforts should not be made: they will reduce the ease of availability which will cut down exposure to this type of material. I actually believe that all pornography should be behind a paywall, and any which is not is blocked (somehow). And no I am not abdicating responsibily of my children to the state - they still need to be taught responsible online behaviour - as I agree above such material will always be available for those who make the effort to circumvent restrictions. We don't not lock our houses because someone can still break in - but it dramatically cuts down on such attempts (and we still educate our children on why breaking into other peoples homes is a bad thing to do).

jiggy2011 13y ago
Why should it all be behind a paywall? And how would one define pornography? If I decide to post some naked pictures of myself online should I have to start processing credit cards and treating it as a business?
yarrel 13y ago
These efforts should not be made because quite apart from being immoral in themselves they are ineffective and have negative side effects.
andyhmltn 13y ago
>I actually believe that all pornography should be behind a paywall That's absurd! Really? Cutting off huge portions of the internet for 'safety' is both wrong and impossible. That's the beauty of the web: Nobody decides 'what gets put up' and what doesn't. Guess what would happen if a country implemented such a thing? People would just use international sites as many do already.
- retube 13y ago
  You do not justify why it's wrong? And as I said in my OP, yes it is impossible, but some measures will cut exposure.

tehmaco 13y ago

I doubt that'll work - the PirateBay is currently blocked in the UK. If you change your DNS settings to use a non-UK server, it still returns the filtered IP address as they're silently intercepting lookups for banned domains and returning a non-authoritative answer. All they'd need to do is add in the 'adult' domains and that'd block the simplest workaround. You could still set up a non-UK VPN and bypass it entirely though ;)

workbench 13y ago
The Pirate Bay blocks actually use CleanFeed IIRC, which is the system originally put in place under the premise to block known child pornography domains. I consider this an abuse of the CleanFeed system.
dspillett 13y ago
> I doubt that'll work - the PirateBay is currently blocked in the UK. If you change your DNS settings to use a non-UK server, it still returns the filtered IP address as they're silently intercepting lookups for banned domains and returning a non-authoritative answer. Not on my ISP (A&A), though that may be the case for the big six. As you say, the VPN option is an easy way around. <hat material="tinfoil">Until the government mandate that ISPs should block anything like that unless you have a license for encrypted traffic, of course.</hat>